Does Penguin Help Negative SEO?

[Vizergy]

With negative link targeting seeming to become more and more of a ‘standard practice’ for more and more agencies and freelance SEOs (I, for one, have had to use the disavow tool far more than I ever thought I would) and the fact that there are more “link building services” that really only build ‘crap’ links than there were when that type of link building worked, I am honestly a bit afraid that Google is really just pushing SEO’s to the ‘dark side’ or at least handing black hat link builders a great tool for bringing down the competition.  I had one SEO actually say to me “If my client can’t recover than at least I can target everyone that jumped ahead of them and only spend around $300 on bad link building”.  This came from someone I NEVER thought would say anything of the sort and really got me to thinking’ “will this be the future of SEO?”  I know the answer is no but still, it seems more and more people are just throwing their hands up and targeting competition rather than working on their own websites and with updates like Penguin I am afraid that more of my time will be spent disavowing links than building them.

[Njave_MCP]

Hello! It isn't a clear cut answer on it. For example, Penguin 2.0 hit a day ago. Some of the sites I managed saw decreased rankings, while some shown increased. Some of them were hit by what it seems is spammy links created for them, but some have not. I am really into believing Google simply ignores these spammy links as they are not real, they do not poise any real threat, show no real relevance and that's it!

[Vizergy]

I hope that is the case  Thanks for responding.

[Njave_MCP]

My idea behind it was not to loose any time and effort about it. Anyone can go online and buy thousands of links from various sources for little or no relevant amount of money at all. Google simply devalues those links and allows us to work our best to create a healthy link profile, where we promote services, provide good content, research, helpful articles and such, thus garnering links from a various selection of sources. We had an issue with one website which was hit by a ton of spammy links from some bookmarking services. No action was taken. Seems a bit wrong to waste time and money on something you cannot control perfectly. After all, you can use the disavow tool if you wanna do something before anything happens, but I wouldn't recommend it.

[KarlBantleman]

I think it largely depends on the industry you are in. The important thing to remember is that SEO is a long term strategy and therefore a long term commitment.

Google is always looking to refine its searches and it will get to all industries and those who are spamming will eventually get penalised. As Penguin 2.0 has only just been released, give it a few days and you will see the true effect of it. Keep the faith (even though its hard to sometimes!)

[Vizergy]

Thank you!  I suppose I was just really ranting.  I shouldnt let this stuff get to me